


Domestic

by flippantninny



Category: The Walking Dead (TV), Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-31
Updated: 2014-08-31
Packaged: 2018-02-15 12:29:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2229057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flippantninny/pseuds/flippantninny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story of Daryl and Beth in a world with no zombies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Domestic

**Author's Note:**

> On tumblr I sometimes make posts about this world in my head, called no zombie AU domestic Bethyl. I'm never going to write it, but I have this whole story in my head. This is a summary. It's not the most well written thing I've ever posted, it's not really a fic, it's just a summary. If you want to see my other stuff for this AU just go to my tumblr (flippantninny) and it's all in the no-zombie-AU-domestic-Bethyl tag.

Beth and Daryl meet when Beth is 19 and Daryl is 37 and she’s in school to become a nurse and he’s working at a garage where he’s the owner/mechanic.  
  
He got the garage from Dale, who left it to him in his will.

* * *

This is the story of how he met Rick and Lori.  
  
Basically one day Daryl’s riding along on his motorbike when he sees a car pulled over. He stops to see what’s up (he knows cars and engines, so figures he can help) and it’s just a punctured tire, but the woman is freaking out a bit because she’s very pregnant and her phone’s dead, so Daryl says he’ll put on the spare, if she wants. She’s a little wary, he’s a big scary biker and she’s small and pregnant. So he offers to give her his phone so she can call her husband, and she accepts, calls her husband, who happens to be a cop, and Daryl fixes on the spare. She tells him her name is Lori, he tells her his name is Daryl. Later that night a cop knocks on his door, Rick. Rick says thank you, thank you for helping my wife, I have a friend who owns a garage, he’s looking for help, would you like a job? Daryl accepts, next thing he knows he’s working at Dale’s garage and Rick is his best friend.

* * *

One day Beth’s driving home from school and her car dies and she’s stranded so she calls the first garage on google and, surprise surprise, it’s Daryl’s. He tows it back to his garage and fixes it up and they hit it off, conversation just flows naturally between them. Which is really rare for Daryl, like he doesn’t get along with anyone this easily. Usually customers drop off their car and leave, which is how Daryl likes it, he doesn’t like small talk, but Beth hangs around, watches him work. And he stays late that day, fixing the thing that caused it to die (the starter broke, it was making a funny noise so Beth pulled over and stopped the engine, then it wouldn’t start again) and then he wasted time, doing unnecessary jobs while she talked about school and her apartment and her family. He didn’t charge her for any of the extras, just the initial fix. She pays and leaves and he thinks he’ll never see her again.  
  
The next day she shows up back at his garage and offers to cook him dinner, as a thank you, despite the fact he protests because he’s just doing his job, she has nothing to thank him for. She tells him that she might not know cars as well as he does, but she knows he did extra stuff to her car, cleaned up the battery, replaced the air filter, changed the spark plugs, gave her new damn windscreen wipers. Ge might not want paying for it, but she was going to cook him a damn meal.  
  
She buys some ingredients, he tells her his address, she cooks him dinner, they have a lovely meal, and she leaves.  
  
But it starts becoming a thing that she just shows up at the garage to study, she says it’s because she hates the library, but she just really likes talking to Daryl. And he fixes the cars while she reads her books and sometimes they talk and sometimes they don’t.  
  
And Daryl is kind of worried he’s reading the signs wrong, and he might regret it, but one day, after she’s been studying at the garage for exactly one month and seventeen days, he asks her on a date.  
  
And she says yes.  
  
They go to a restaurant that’s way too fancy, but he wanted to impress her, and they’re both nervous and the waiter is rude to him and flirts with her and he spills a glass of water all over the table before they’ve even ordered their food. And it’s a train wreck. Until she leans over the table and asks him if he wants to get out of that place. They end up in a McDonalds, he has a big mac, she has McNuggets, they share fries.  
  
They kiss after that date.  
  
They have sex after the fourth date. After it. The day after. In the garage after all Daryl’s employees have gone home and it’s quiet and empty and she comes by in a pretty little dress, white with red along the neckline and the hem and the waist, dotted little red flowers, and she kisses him on the cheek and he tries to tell himself no, that she’s only nineteen and he should wait a while longer, but she’s just so damn perfect. She’s pleased. She’s been trying to seduce him since the first night they had dinner together.  
  
After the fifth date he tells her he loves her. It’s awkward and quiet and she doesn’t hear him at first, because he mumbles and she doesn’t think he could possibly be saying what she thinks he’s saying because it’s so soon. But he is. He tells her he loves her and she kisses him and whispers it back and he doesn’t know if he believes her, but she keeps on telling him, and he finds it even harder to believe a girl like Beth would lie to him. So it must be true. She must love him.  
  
They date for two years before he asks her to move in. In the time between them starting to date and them moving in, she became a nurse, his business continued to do well, and she spends almost every other night at his apartment. They go on double dates with Rick and Lori. Beth meets their son, Carl. Daryl meets Maggie and Glenn. He meets Hershel. He tells Beth about Merle. About his mother and father. About growing up with no one, about thinking he’s nothing. She tells him he’s everything.  
  
She says no to moving into his apartment, because his apartment is small and shitty and she’s a fully qualified registered nurse now, and his garage is doing well and she doesn’t want to leave her nice apartment for his shitty one. But her apartment is too small for the two of them. So she says she’ll move into a new apartment with him. Not hers, or his, but theirs.  
  
They look at a few apartments and none of them are right until they step into one. And it’s perfect. It has large windows and the sunlight shines in and it’s a nice part of Atlanta. It has a spare room and a big room for them and Beth likes to think that one day that spare room might be a nursery, and then a bedroom. She wants two kids, so maybe one day they’ll have to move again, to a bigger apartment, or a house maybe, but for now, this is perfect.  
  
They move in as quickly as they can.  
  
For a week, every time they enter their apartment, he insists on carrying her over the threshold. It’s silly and inconvenient, because they end up having to put down their groceries so he can walk two steps with her in his arms, then turn around and pick them up again, but he insists. Because, as she learned very early on, Daryl would never admit it, but he’s a big romantic.  
  
They eat off paper plates for a week because Daryl likes the plates and cutlery from his apartment and Beth likes the plates and cutlery from hers and they can’t decide which set to use, so they don’t. They end up buying new plates and cutlery.  
  
They live together in that apartment for three months before Beth tells him she wants a dog. They go to the shelter, and there’s a mutt, just 5 months old, and they have no idea exactly what he is but he’s brown and grey with floppy ears and a waggy tail and she falls in love.  
  
She calls him Bear and he calls him Lil Asshole and after a week he falls in love with him too.  
  
Daryl tells Beth she better train Bear. She housetrains him, but that’s about it. He’s excitable, won’t sit or stay or do anything like that. But Daryl has a way with animals and while Beth is at work he slowly trains Bear to sit, among other things. Him and Bear bond.  
  
One day Beth comes home and Bear is excitably jumping up at her and she’s tired and it’s been a long day and she just yells “sit”. And Bear sits. And she stares at Daryl with this shocked expression and he laughs.  
  
A few months later Beth and Daryl go to Glenn and Maggie’s wedding. Beth is the maid of honour, Daryl isn’t in the wedding party, he just sits in the pews of the church and watches his girl walking down the aisle. At this point him and Glenn aren’t friends, they barely know each other. Before long they’re the best of friends.  
  
Beth tells him she loves him all the time, every day. Daryl doesn’t say it quite so much, but every time he does it always makes her heart jump a little bit. And it comes with no warning, she never expects it.  
  
She’ll be cooking and telling him about her day and he’ll look at her, and she’ll say “what?” and he’ll say “I love you”.  
  
She’ll be in a store, trying on dresses, and after the second dress he looks so bored she feels bad about forcing him to tag along. After the third he tells her “that one’s fine, just get that one,” after the fourth he tells her “you look beautiful,” after the fifth he says nothing, after the sixth he says “I love you,” and she has to run back into the changing room because she can’t stop smiling.  
  
They’ll be eating McDonalds and she’ll spill some ketchup on her shirt and he'll say “I love you.”  
  
Beth tells him she loves him every day and he tells her he loves her maybe once a month, if that. His declarations are rare, and she doesn’t need them because she knows anyway, but when he tells her, when the words fall from his mouth from seemingly no reason whatsoever, that’s when she smiles the brightest.  
  
Two years later Glenn and Maggie have a baby, Shawn (named after Maggie and Beth’s brother, who died in a car accident). (Beth and her mother were in the car too, Beth survived, Annette didn’t, Beth was fifteen at the time, she’s still not over it. Every year her and Daryl go to their graves and she cries and he holds her and he tells her it’ll be okay. And then they get McDonalds. She gets McNuggets. He gets a Big Mac. They share the fries.)  
  
Maggie and Glenn ask Beth and Daryl to be the godparents.  
  
They go to Hershel’s for Christmases. Hershel, Beth, Daryl, Glenn, Maggie, and Shawn. Every year Beth gives Daryl two presents. One from her, and another that she insists is from Santa Claus. The first Christmas they have at Hershel’s farm, he pulls Daryl aside and tells him that he’s not the sort of guy he pictured his Bethy with, and at first he was concerned, before he met Daryl, when all he’d seen was a picture, and he still has concerns, concerns about what happens in ten, twenty years time, when Beth is still young and Daryl is not and their ages start to matter, but anyone who loves Beth as much as Daryl did was good enough for Hershel’s little girl. Hershel calls Daryl “Son” and Daryl finally starts to get what a real father is.  
  
Beth is 25 and Daryl is 42 and they still live in that same apartment when Beth tells Daryl she wants a baby. He tells her no. She asks why. She already knows about his father, but it takes a week of barely talking and awkward tension for Beth to find out that it’s because Daryl is scared he’ll be like his father that he says no. She tells him he’s an idiot. She tells him she loves him and she knows him and she knows he would never be like that man. It’s the only time she sees him cry.  
  
He tells her he wants to start trying to have a baby with her exactly seven days after she first mentioned it to him.  
  
They have already decided not to get married, Daryl says he doesn’t like marriage, not after watching his parents, and she decides that as long as she knows he loves her and he knows she loves him, it doesn’t matter. She kind of wanted a wedding, but she was happy to go without.  
  
She stops taking her birth control and they start trying.  
  
A few weeks later Beth is hit by a drunk driver. She dies instantly.  
  
For a week the only time Daryl leaves the apartment is to walk Bear. He smashes their plates and throws out the bedspreads she picked out. He later regrets that.  
  
Then he goes to the funeral.  
  
The day of the funeral he starts drinking. He doesn’t stop.  
  
Two months after Beth’s death he starts seeing a therapist. Lori set up the appointment and Rick forced him to go and Maggie and Glenn drive him to the therapist's office. He stops drinking, it’s not easy, and he starts writing Beth letters. Letters telling her he misses her, letters asking her why.  
  
He writes a letter a day for two and a half months, and then one day he doesn’t. He doesn’t stop writing them entirely, he only writes them on the harder days. He puts more focus into his business (which really needed the focus, business had begun to slip after Beth’s death. He knows it’s because of the drinking and the absenteeism, but he also thinks it’s a little bit a reflection of the world since Beth’s death).  
  
But he starts getting his life together. He keeps seeing the shrink, but he sees her less and less. He starts babysitting Shawn more often and going out with friends, with Rick and Glenn. He even reconnects with Merle, who he hasn’t seen since before he met Beth, who Beth kept telling him he should call. Merle’s still an asshole, but he’s a sober asshole. They get along better now. They talk about their father. They talk about how Merle might have turned to drugs and Daryl might have turned to booze, but at least they never became him.  
  
A few months after he first called his brother, Daryl tells Merle about Beth. All about her. About the way she would keep fresh flowers on the table by their door. About the way she cooked him meals almost every night, and almost every night he would lean on the kitchen counter and tell her about his day while she cooked, and she would tell him about hers, about patients and lives saved and rude doctors and families. A few days she would cry about patients lost. Most days she would smile about lives saved. She would tell him about days when she had to go to the local school and give shots to the students. Daryl told Merle about the sunshine yellow of her hair and the rose of her lips and the way she laughed at half his jokes and rolled her eyes at the other half, because Beth Greene was never the sort of girl who laughed at your joke if she didn’t find it funny.  
  
And he told Merle that he and Beth had been trying to have a kid.  
  
It got better now he had Merle back in his life. Daryl learned that life goes on. The business became more successful once again, he taught Shawn to hunt and became godfather to another kid, Maggie and Glenn’s second kid, Josie.  
  
He didn’t like to think about how Beth had wanted a little boy and an even littler girl. How Maggie and Glenn were happy and together with a son and a daughter and it was exactly the life Beth had wanted.  
  
He taught Josie to hunt too, after a few more years.  
  
And Daryl never dated anyone else, never really spoke to many women after that, but he thought he had recovered.  
  
When Daryl was 59 years old Bear passed away of old age. Daryl hadn’t recovered. He and Beth had got Bear together, they drove to the shelter together and held hands while they walked past the dogs, he had raised Bear with Beth. Losing Bear was like losing Beth all over again. Old, carefully stitched up wounds were suddenly torn apart, reminding him that the stitching was never very strong to begin with, that he'd been holding it together since Beth's death, but only by a few precarious threads.  
  
He never even wanted the damn dog. He told Beth he didn’t want a dog. It wasn’t his dog. It was Beth’s. And some asshole stole her from him and now he’d spent almost two decades taking care of that dog, of Beth’s dog, of their dog, and now even he was gone.  
  
He started drinking again.  
  
Except this time he had Merle there, who told him to sort himself out, told him this wasn’t okay. Merle moved in with him two days after Bear died. Merle threw out the booze and forced his baby brother to sober up.  
  
Life went on.  
  
Daryl started seeing his therapist again.  
  
He still wrote letters, now and again, to Beth.  
  
His life was pretty empty after that. Rick and Merle tried to convince him to get another dog, but he couldn’t. Rick set him up on dates a couple of times, but it never went beyond a first date. He sold his garage and moved from the apartment, from Atlanta, further south, to an area he used to hunt in a lot. He kept a picture of Beth in his wallet. One time someone saw the picture and asked if it was his daughter. He wrote a letter to Beth about it, he knew she would have laughed at that, called him an old man, then kissed him until he felt young again.  
  
Daryl died at age seventy. Lung cancer. He quit smoking five months after he met Beth. He started again the day she died.  
  
No one had attended his father’s funeral.  
  
The same could not be said of Daryl Dixon’s. The service was filled with people, people who loved him, people who he loved. More Greene’s than he knew he knew. Almost everyone who had ever worked for him. The Grimes’. The Rhee’s. Neighbours and customers. Merle.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> So that’s the story. There’s a lot more details, they’re all in my head. If I had the time and the patience I could honestly write several novels about this world in my head, but I don’t. And it would mostly be boring. Because I could write about almost every day of their lives.
> 
> But instead I just write about random stuff, fluffy headcanons.
> 
> So yeah, when I’m writing about them playing Mario Kart with him losing and her about to win, until he throws a blue shell at her and she yells and pushes him off the couch and he pulls her off with him and tickles her until she cries and laughs and screams his name, or about them shopping at the grocery store, and him kissing her when he thinks no one’s looking, then awkwardly walking just behind her when he knows someone is, because Daryl Dixon has never been one for PDA but as soon as he thinks they’re alone he can’t stop himself from reaching out to her, or him telling her that he doesn’t want a dog and if she wants one she can take care of it, then falling asleep with the dog on his chest, or Daryl watching Beth, Maid of Honour, walking down the aisle at Glenn and Maggie’s wedding, this is it. This is the story I have in my head. I don’t know where it came from, but every little no zombie AU Bethyl thing I write, it’s all part of this world. And people are always like “omg these are so cute omg so fluffy I’m crying” and I’m like “I’M CRYING TOO BECAUSE BETH IS DEAD AND DARYL IS SAD AND NOTHING IS OKAY.” And I don’t know where this world comes from, I think about domestic Bethyl a lot and I just kind of started thinking ‘well what happens a few more years down the line’ and ‘do they get old together’ and then I couldn’t imagine them old together but I could imagine sad Daryl and then this happened in my head and I’ve been sad about it for like a month so.
> 
> (And if you want to know anything else about this world, just like message me, because there’s a lot of details, Maggie and Glenn’s wedding for instance, I have that fully fleshed out in my head. Beth’s bridesmaids dress is lilac. Maggie’s dress is just past knee length and strapless.) .  
> 


End file.
